Dicks’ Sporting Goods issued a statement after the Dec. 14, 2012 shooting, in which Adam Lanza killed 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School with a Bushmaster assault rifle, that it would suspend the sales of assault rifles.

“We are extremely saddened by the unspeakable tragedy that occurred last week,” said the statement, “and our hearts go out to victims and their families and to the entire community. Out of respect for the victims and their families, during this time of national mourning we have removed all guns from sale and from display in our store nearest to Newtown and suspended the sale of modern sporting rifles in all of our stores chainwide.”

Gun control activists praised the chain’s decision at the time. But now Dick’s has opened the first store in a new chain called Field & Stream that specializes in hunting and fishing products, and a call to the store in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania reveals that Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifles are for sale.

“We have a full stock,” said a clerk who identified himself as Gary. He said the guns retailed for $800, and that the gun counter was “really busy.”

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) speaks alongside with Vice President Joe Biden and family members of Newtown victims on commonsense measures to reduce gun violence in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington April 17, 2013.Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas

(Reuters) – In the end, nothing could persuade enough U.S. senators to approve the most significant gun legislation in two decades:

Not the carnage from Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were massacred by a gunman in December, igniting a national debate on gun control.

Not the impassioned pleas of Newtown survivors’ families, whose calls for expanded background checks for gun buyers so moved a pro-gun senator from West Virginia that he became their advocate.

And not the support of President Barack Obama, who was inspired by Newtown to make gun control the first major initiative of his second term.

The U.S. Senate‘s key vote on Wednesday wasn’t exactly a rejection of expanded background checks, gun-control advocates were careful to point out.

Most senators – 54 – approved the measure, which polls indicated was backed by more than 80 percent of Americans. But because Republicans threatened to use a filibuster to block any gun proposal that did not get 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, the plan to expand background checks to sales made online and at gun shows fell short.

And just like that, the most aggressive push for gun control in a generation did, too.

(CNN) — As withmany murder-suicides, the gunman in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting took to his grave the reasons that compelled him to kill more than two dozen people before taking his own life in the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

But those who knew the shooter struggled to reconcile the difference between the quiet, withdrawn 20-year-old without a criminal record and the man whodonned black fatigues and a military vest and rained hell at Sandy Hook Elementary School last week.

Police said the shooter was Adam Lanza and that he killed his mother, Nancy, in their home before walking into the school and spraying with

A yearbook photo of Adam Lanza, taken during his sophomore year in 2008.